Classes

[Denis McMahon]

On Sat, 01 Nov 2014 12:42:10 -0400, Seymore4Head wrote:

> OK  Maybe I misunderstood the question.
> 
> My answer to you then is ......I don't know.  I will have to think about
> it some more.

The question (I thought) was to write a class for Square that inherited a 
class Rectangle but imposed on it the additional constraints of a square 
over a rectangle, namely that length == width.

To do this, you need to override the inherited methods to set length and 
width with new methods to set length and width as follows:

when setting length, also set width equal to length.
when setting width, also set length equal to width.

For bonus points, if your constructor accepts width and length parameters 
(from the Rectangle constructor) then detect if they are different and 
raise a suitable error.

from math import sqrt

class SquareGeometryError(Exception):
    """The parameters create an illegal geometry for a square"""
    pass

class Rectangle:

    def __init__(self,length,width):
        self.length=length 
        self.width=width

    def area(self):
        return self.length*self.width

    def perimeter(self):
        return 2*self.length+2*self.width

    def diagonal(self):
        return sqrt(self.length*self.length+self.width*self.width)

    def get_width(self):
        return self.width

    def get_length(self):
        return self.length

    def set_width(self, width):
        self.width = width

    def set_length(self, length):
        self.length = length

class Square(Rectangle):

    _def _init__(self, length, width):
        if not length == width:
            raise SquareGeometryError("Length must equal width")
        self.length = length # or width
        self.width = length # or width

    def set_width(self, width):
        self.length = width
        self.width = width

    def set_length(self, length):
        self.length = length
        self.width = length

Note that to make my square, I only need to over-ride those rectangle 
methods which allow the setting of length and width to enforce squareness 
upon the square. All the other methods of rectangle will work equally 
well for the square.

-- 
Denis McMahon, denismfmcmahon at gmail.com